A wild and solitary life

ABC Open traveled to Portland to join photographers on a wild walk to Cape Nelson, where a lighthouse was first lit in 1884. Lighthouses, positioned on the wildest, windiest parts of our most treacherous coastlines, make for a wild existence.

In the picture above, you can begin to imagine how wild the life of an early lighthouse keeper may have been. You can see the keeper's house with its quaint red-topped chimneys peeking above the horizen of the foliage. A house like a struggling swimmer, just keeping its head above water.

Lighthouse keeper; a job that is remote, surrounded by wilderness, requires staying awake through the middle of cold and stormy nights. Imagine climbing the 122 steps to operate a lighthouse lamp amidst lightning, rain and thunder, to guide the ships away from treacherous cliffs and back into port.

This is wild and this is lonely.

There was a young child of a lighthouse keeper, Frank Piper. He lived at Cape Nelson, was schooled by correspondence and by the age of 6, had not yet met another child. When he finally did, he was overcome with emotion.

It is difficult to get a sense of how strange the world can become when humans chose such isolated existences until you spend some time at a place like this.

A few years ago, some friends and I hired out a lighthouse keeper's house for a weekend. It was beautiful and fun, but as the days wore on we began to imagine the lives of the original keepers.

Usually a head keeper would live alongside their assistant and junior assistant. Sometimes with a family or wife. They would be separated by an internal wall or sometimes the assistants would be sequestered away in a smaller cottage.

Did they get along? Was there murder, intrigue, ghosts? If they didn't get along, wouldn't that be a long, interminably awkward silence?

It was a group of photographers, however that introduced me to the Cape Nelson Lighthouse. They had just attended an ABC Open photography workshop in Portland, focusing on composition, light, and exposure. Wanting to find some Wild subjects to photograph for this month's theme, Cape Nelson Lighthouse was the place to go.

I could see the weather was taking a real turn, so I had to nip into the op-shop and grab a raincoat. All I could find was this ridiculous, huge, bright yellow plastic thing. This will now become a staple in the car boot! (Living in Queensland, I have not had to think about rain for quite some time).

You can check out a gallery of photos from the excursion here. And I will be back in Portland this weekend running a similar activity for DSLR camera users. Events are listed here.

We were only there for a few hours but in that time, we watched the sky turn from rainbows to rain clouds. A fierce, cold wind whistled into every coat sleeve.

Looking up at the sky the sun lit up the bushland foreground and white buildings, contrasting beautifully with the steely dark clouds behind. I commented that this was the perfect lighting scenario for photography.

My next comment was "aah, we better get out of here, that sky is about to drop!" Within moments of scrambling back into cars, the sky opened and freezing cold bullets of rain pelted down all around us.

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Comment

Gemma Deavin

Wow Em. It sounds like the perfect location for a Wild workshop. I had a similar experience spending time in a lighthouse cottage for the weekend. It was on Montague Island off NSW's south coast at Narooma. I thought a lot about the families that spent time out there. The wind, the skies and the rain - we had it all! I look forward to seeing the photos from this weekend's session!